Sabatier and external control

The government has the power to initiate policies that promote or stimulate the use of LCA's. I will name four that have been named by Frank Boons in his lecture on 6 nov 2014;

Altering market conditions.
The government can stimulate the use of LCA's by altering market conditions in such a way that it creates incentives when using LCA's. For example, the government could subsidize companies that are willing to use LCA's but can't because the process is long and the software is expensive. This may be an incentive for companies to use an LCA, since an analysis like this is time consuming and thus expensive.

Altering available information.
LCA's can be promoted as well through altering information. If certain activities require an assessment of environmental performance, then offering information on LCA's on for example online searching tools can have a positive impact on the use of LCA's. This puts LCA in the spotlights while other environmental assessment tools may also be of use but less known because they are not displayed.

Self governance systrems may be used by the government as well to promote the use LCA. Certain organisations or groups of organisations have core beliefs and secondary beliefs (Sabatier, 1998). These secondary aspects are based on various causal factors that may be altered by external control from the government. The government can subsidise an organisation that offers LCA's, allowing them to sell their services cheaper, or promote their services more active through media. This way, the government uses private self governance systems to promote the use of LCA's.

Another way for the government to increase the use of LCA's is to invest in research done to improve LCA methods. This in turn makes LCA a more trustworthy method and therfore it could gain popularity.

Effectiveness of measures
To assess whether the sorts of emasures presented above are effective in comparison to other measures, one can find it usefull to use Sabatiers framework (1980) that describes different stages of the implementation process of a policy. five main steps are described:

1. Policy outputs of implementing agency
2. compliance with policy output by target groups
3. actual impacts of policy outputs
4. perceived impacts of policy outputs
5. major revision in statute

In my opinion, step 3 and 4 are most important in assessing the results of an implemented policy. At first sight, it may seem most important to review the actual impacts of a policy. However, it usually takes a couple of years for results of policies to actually become clear, therefore assumptions may change over time and may differ strongly amongst different organisations/coalitions. Therefore it is in my opinion at least as important to review the perceived impacts of policy outputs, since these may be viewed as truth as well.